Standard month-end account statement generation processes can take five or more days for a corporate accounting department to complete. Though such processes are now somewhat automated by various software accounting programs, they remain manually intensive in various aspects. For example, prior systems generate and print statements as a batch printing job, whereby all account statements in the batch may only be printed together (in order to prevent duplicate billing or the loss of individual statements). After printing, the statements are manually reviewed for accuracy and appearance in a quality review process, after which the statements are distributed to the appropriate billed parties. If problems in any statements are discovered during quality review, the data for any such erroneous statements must be re-entered into the accounting system and the entire batch printing job must be run again. This can substantially increase the time it takes to disseminate account statements, thereby negatively impacting the amount of time it takes a company to collect billed amounts or to report account data to its clients.
In addition, in many large scale corporate departments or other entities that employ this type of statement generation, account statement generation programs must retrieve data from diverse accounting systems or platforms that may be employed in various corporate departments. The collection of data across multiple platforms is prone to error and requires time-consuming cross-checking in order to properly confirm the accuracy of any account statements generated in that environment.
Furthermore, many businesses keep only manual records for (i) reporting formats that are to be provided for a given account statement, (ii) recipients and contact addresses for such statements, and (iii) any specialized reporting formats and updates to the same that are needed for a given recipient when multiple statements are generated for the same account. The end result of such manual record-keeping is that statements oftentimes have non-uniform font styles that vary from page to page, inconsistent page numbering schemes, and an inability to reliably generate a table of contents or other useful layouts for batch printed account statements, as may be expected by and useful to a client.
Accordingly, there is a need for a account statement generation process that addresses certain problems in existing technologies.